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Description

Over the past forty years, Canadian literature has found its way to the silver screen with increasing regularity. Beginning with the adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God to the Hollywood film Rachel, Rachel in 1966, Canadian writing would appear to have found a doubly successful life for itself at the movies: from the critically acclaimed Kamouraska and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in the 1970s through to the award-winning Love and Human Remains and The English Patient in the 1990s. With the more recent notoriety surrounding the Oscar-nominated Away from Her, and the screen appearances of The Stone Angel and Fugitive Pieces, this seems like an appropriate time for a collection of essays to reflect on the intersection between literary publication in Canada, and its various screen transformations. This volume discusses and debates several double-edged issues: the extent to which the literary artefact extends its artfulness to the film artefact, the degree to which literary communities stand to gain (or lose) in contact with film communities, and perhaps most of all, the measure by which a viable relation between fiction and film can be said to exist in Canada, and where that double-life precisely manifests itself, if at all.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: David Jarraway
PART ONE: REALISM AND ITS “OTHERS”
Chapter 1: Beyond the National-Realist Text: Imagining the Impossible Nation in Contemporary Canadian Cinema by Jim Leach
Chapter 2: Griersonian "Actuality" and Social Protest in Dorothy Livesay’s Documentary Poems by Tania Aguila-Way
Chapter 3: “Stunning and Strange": Iceland as Memory and Prophecy in Alice Munro’s "White Dump" and Sarah Polley's "Away from Her’” by Nadine Fladd
Chapter 4: Maddin, Melodrama, and the Pre-National by Jennifer Henderson and Brian Johnson
Chapter 5: Dialogic Phantasy in Bruce McDonald’s Adaptive Narratives by Gregory Betts
PART TWO: ADAPTATION, FOR BETTER OR WORSE
Chapter 6: Reading Canadian Film Credits: Adapting Institutions, Systems, and Affects by Peter Dickinson
Chapter 7: Sisters in the Wilderness: Mythologizing Catharine Parr Traill by Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr
Chapter 8: “‘Triumph" in the Backwoods: The CBC’s Take on Moodie and Traill in Sisters in the Wilderness (2000) by Christa Zeller Thomas
Chapter 9: The Director’s Medium: Richard Attenborough’s De-Authorization of Grey Owl by Albert Braz
Chapter 10: Narrative Structure and Narrative Voices in The English Patient: Film And Novel--A Comparative Study by Christine Evain
Chapter 11: Loser Wins: The Rhetoric of High Modernism in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Bradley D. Clissold
Chapter 12: Why They Cannot Get It Right: A Reader’s Notes about Richler on Screen by Natalia Vesselova
Chapter 13: “‘[I]t’s my nature": A Comparison of Hagar Shipley’s Pride in The Stone Angel Novel and Film by Carmela Coccimiglio
PART THREE: IDENTITY: “TO BE, OR NOT TO BE”
Chapter 14: Why Sex Matters in Canadian Film and Literature by Katherine Monk
Chapter 15: The Nature of Things: Coupland, Cinema and the Canadian Sixties and Seventies by Andrew Burke
Chapter 16: Adapting Men to New Times?: Engagements with Maculinism in John Howe’s Why Rock the Boat? by Elspeth Tulloch
Chapter 17: Filming Music: Adapting Transnational Sound in The English Patient and Fugitive Pieces by Katherine McLeod
Chapter 18: “‘Something’s missing": Exploding Girlhood in The Tracy Fragments by Tanis MacDonald